YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

via YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood.

VGA, DVI display interfaces to bow out in five years

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are phasing out chipset support for VGA by 2015, which could discourage PC makers from adding VGA ports. PC makers would need to add a separate chipset on the motherboard for VGA connectors, which could add to the cost of making a PC, O’Rourke said. Advanced Micro Devices has announced it would phase out chipset support for DVI by 2015.

via VGA, DVI display interfaces to bow out in five years – Components, NPD Group – Techworld.

Online Reputation Manager Hacked Websites To ‘inject’ Illegal Code

But Meade said Rexxfield owner and operator Michael Roberts was preparing to purchase a coding hack he called “injection source code” that lets the user manipulate the metadata behind a website, adding a “noindex” tag that drops the results on search engines like Google and Bing — hiding them completely.

Meade said Roberts showed him the code injector’s effectiveness by hacking into Ripoff Report, a complaint board site.

via EXCLUSIVE: Online Reputation Manager Hacked Websites To ‘inject’ Illegal Code | Fox News.

Megaupload’s demise: What happens to your files when a cloud service dies?

There have always been two major concerns about cloud services in general, and cloud storage (Dropbox, Megaupload, SkyDrive, iCloud, and so on). The first is privacy: When you upload data to a third party, there’s always the risk that they can look at the contents of your files. Some cloud providers securely encrypt data, but many don’t. The second issue is data security and integrity: Does the third party keep a tight ship against hackers? What happens if a hard drive fails? What protections have the cloud provider put in place to mitigate against natural disasters, bankruptcy, or being shut down by the Feds?

via Megaupload’s demise: What happens to your files when a cloud service dies? | ExtremeTech.

Welcome to Apache™ Hadoop™!

The Apache™ Hadoop™ project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-avaiability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-availabile service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

via Welcome to Apache™ Hadoop™!.